Shane Claiborne in The Irresistible Revolution:
Once we are actually friends with folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity.
Gurwinder:
The Opinion Pageant: The rise of social media as the primary mode of interaction has caused us to overvalue opinions as a gauge of character. We are now defined more by what we say than what we actually do, and words, unlike deeds, are cheap and easy to counterfeit.
Help me name my new creation which I made for the kids for dinner tonight. It’s a quesadilla with leftover spaghetti bolognaise sauce and despite Luna’s objections, it’s great!
Coming soon to old London Town, pixels that I made in Burleigh Heads.
Rutger Bregman in Humankind:
Cynicism is a theory of everything. The cynic is always right.
Three years of hell
Three years ago today I had the wildest, wettest day at work so far. Bringing a wedding forward a day, performing the wedding ceremony I already had for that day, then doing the brought-forward ceremony in the rain, rushing back to Sydney Airport from the Blue Mountains, every store is closed in the airport and we catch the fabled last flight into Queensland before they closed the border.
Three years of hell. Here’s to never getting so silly ever again. You can’t stop people from dying, it’s inevitable, but you can stop people from living.
Most people I respect or look up to journal every day but it’s not a habit I can get into. Tonight I learned about the simple and powerful 1-1-1 journalling method, and then to get nerdy with it, there’s a tutorial on making a Shortcut to make it easier. Then follow this advice from Apple on how to run a Shortcut from a Reminder, I prompted Siri to remind me of it every day at 9pm.
Had coffee at a cafe in Todos Santos today where they hand out 30-minute wifi access codes. They mixed my order up - bringing a cold americano with hot milk when I ordered the reverse - so my 30 minutes ran out in the middle of a text chat. I asked for another code and the barista said “you should have bought food if you wanted more wifi” then walked away!
A new website for Los Sagrados Horse Sanctuary
Flexed my vintage graphic design skills for the local Baja horse sanctuary recently and I’m pretty proud of the work I’ve done.
I used to do web design professionally back in the olden days when computers were stone tablets and Jesus was a boy.
Plus before now you couldn’t find the ranch on Apple or Google Maps properly, and all the search engines and AI chat models didn’t know about them.
Over the coming weeks that will all change as the databases and algorithms catch up.
The horse sanctuary is a registered Mexican charity so they can now take donations online, and they’re on the way to taking horse riding reservations online, selling tickets to events, and also operating as an event venue with online booking etc.
Plus they’ve now got email on their own domain name so they look and feel more professional to donors and grant-giving organisations.
Finally, for the first time in a web design project I got to make all the photography with Britt so we had full creative control of the project.
📷 Insect (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by a@alexink)
📷 Tiny {people} (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @jasonmcfadden)
It was Luna’s turn to decide what we had for breakfast. Her choice? La Esquina, the cafe with pancakes and a playground.
It’s easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch getting engaged for the fifth time at the ripe age of 92, but at least he’s doing his part to help the wedding industry after Covid. What are you doing? Have you even considered getting married again?
Maryanne Wolf on reading:
Literacy literally changes the human brain. The process of learning to read changes our brain, but so does what we read, how we read and on what we read (print, e-reader, phone, laptop). This is especially important in our new reality, when many people are tethered to multiple screens at any given moment.
She also quotes this which really makes me want to throw the TV in the bin:
When watching a screen, the infant is bombarded with a stream of fast-paced movements, ongoing blinking lights and scene changes, which require ample cognitive resources to make sense of and process. The brain becomes “overwhelmed” and is unable to leave adequate resources for itself to mature in cognitive skills such as executive functions.
You know yo’ve really embedded yourself in a Mexican community when you see a friend riding in the back of a truck on the highway.
📷 Houseplant. Did I do the #mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt right, @jensands)?
(Photo made a few moments ago on the way to get a coffee in Los Cerritos, Baja California Sur)
📷🇲🇽 Analog (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @skarjune)
I made these photos on Playa Cerritos, Baja California Sur, Mexico, on a broken film camera a week ago, then a few days later they were developed in a photo lab at Currumbin Beach, Australia, and I’m posting them today from Las Tunas, Mexico. The wonders of living in a connected world. (Britt has flown back to Australia this week).
📷 Portico (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @annahavrom)
From a snow day in Nashville between Christmas and New Year’s Eve just passed.
Dan Shipper’s representation of AI/GPT as a copilot for the mind harkens back to Steve Jobs talking about computers in 1990 as “a bicycle of the mind”.
Something that takes us past our inherent abilities.